July’s People
July’s People, alternate history novel written by South African author Nadine Gordimer and published in 1981. Set in an imaginary near future in which the apartheid system (still a decade from being abolished when the book was written) has come to a sudden and violent end, July’s People explores the dynamics and revelations brought about by the change.
July’s People takes place shortly after an country-wide uprising by South African Black people has led to civil war. July, a servant in the large house in suburban Johannesburg owned by Bam and Maureen Smales, offers to take his employers and their three children to safety in his home village, and they agree. The party flees the burning city in a Bam’s pickup truck, “the yellow bakkie,” in a three-day journey to July’s village.
There the family is given a mud hut to live in. The change in circumstances for the Smales is shocking and at first unthinkable, but the children soon adjust to their new life. Maureen and Bam try to adapt but cannot grasp that they are without other options. In their newly dependent situation, Maureen’s relationship with July becomes increasingly difficult. Maureen and Bam were liberals and opposed to apartheid, but they confront the limits of their worldview in the village. Maureen is disturbed to see things from her house being used by villagers, while failing to grasp that a relative of July’s had given up her own hut so that the Smales family could occupy it. July’s wife is angered by July’s choice to bring his employers here, as harboring white people puts the village in danger. One day the village chief asks to see the white people. At their audience, the chief asks for Bam’s rifle so that he can fight off foreigners (fighters from neighboring countries have joined the revolution in South Africa) who might try to gain territory from the chief. Later Bam is told that a friend of July’s has taken Bam’s rifle to join the Black African fighters, news that fills him with a sense of powerlessness. Maureen learns that when July was their servant, what she had viewed as kindnesses toward him looked like controlling and condescension to July. The white couple finds the situation untenable but argue over what to do about it.
Gordimer’s complex prose is extraordinarily clear-eyed in juxtaposing past certainties with present doubt. These profound questions of interdependence are hardly capable of resolution. When a helicopter lands in the village, Maureen rushes out to it, not knowing if it portends salvation or destruction, and there the novel ends, itself unresolved. Untrue to history and the actual moment of change in South Africa, July’s People nevertheless provides a truthful dissection of white liberal obliviousness and vulnerability.